
Sarah Palin Endorses Hamas |
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| It's madness to continue asserting Palin's suitability for high office. | |
by Jeffrey Goldberg, September 29, 2008 |
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How can it be that some people still pretend that Sarah Palin is suited for high office? This country has never seen someone so comprehensively unprepared for the vice presidency; Dan Quayle was Metternich by comparison.
I've watched Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric
three times, and my astonishment does not diminish. Her nonsensical
answer about Russia has deservedly been highlighted, but let me focus
on another question, this one concerning the export of democracy.
Couric asked, "What happens if the goal of democracy doesn't produce
the desired outcome? In Gaza, the U.S. pushed hard for elections and
Hamas won."
Palin's
answer, in full, was this: "Yeah, well especially in that region,
though, we have to protect those who do seek democracy and support
those who seek protections for the people who live there. What we're
seeing in the last couple of days here in New York is a President of
Iran, Ahmadinejad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain
for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel ... and we're hearing
the evil that he speaks and if hearing him doesn't allow Americans to
commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need,
especially there in the Mideast, then nothing will."
The issue
here is not that Palin didn't know the answer. There are many possible
answers to this question, some of which are right and some of which are
wrong. The issue here is that she didn't know the question.
Because she was apparently ignorant of the subject, she endorsed Hamas'
victory, and, in essence, called for the U.S. to "protect" Islamists
who seek to use democratic elections to lever themselves into power.
And, of course, Ahmadinejad came to power in a more-or-less democratic
election. Palin's answer was truly remarkable. A person who could be
President of the United States has shown herself to be completely
ignorant of one of the most vexing and important foreign policy
questions of the day. Freshman congressmen know how to answer this
question. Here's one possible Republican response:
"Yes, Katie,
it's true that if you push for democracy, sometimes you get an outcome
that you don't want. This happened in Gaza with Hamas, and I think the
Bush Administration was as surprised as everyone else. So the lesson
here is that you have be careful when you try to export democracy. But
I still believe that, over the long-term, democracy is the best
antidote to terrorism that we have. What we have to do, though, is know
when to push, and know when not to push. And every day, we have to do
the hard work of advocating for press freedom, and the rule of law, and
for all those things that build a civil society."
See? Not that hard. Unless you don't:
a) Know what happened in Gaza;
b) Know where Gaza is;
c) Know who rules Gaza today;
d) Care.
I
want to wait and see Palin on Thursday night in her debate with Joe
Biden; perhaps her performance in the Couric interview was abnormally
bad. But I have a terrible feeling that John McCain has placed this
country - and, of lesser importance, his campaign - in an untenable
position.
[This is cross-posted from Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic blog, which we think is great, and you should visit often]
History Rewritten With Lightning |
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| Quentin Tarantino's Masterpiece | |
by Charlie Bertsch, September 4, 2009 |
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There are scenes in Quentin Tarentino’s new film Inglourious Basterds sure to make your heart race. The film opens with a tour-de-force of tension, in which SS Colonel Hans Landa, superbly played by Christoph Waltz, interrogates a dairy farmer suspected of harboring a Jewish family. At first we admire the farmer, who shows remarkable calm in dealing with his unwelcome guest. But as Landa slowly tightens the screws, our confidence in the farmer lags. We feel for him, but begin searching for a way out of our initial identification. It is only a matter of time before he sells out the family hiding beneath his floorboards. By the end of the scene we have abandoned the farmer – he no longer matters to us – and transferred our emotional bond to the teenage girl who manages to flee the fate of her family members, stumbling through lush green meadows while Landa watches her with bemusement from a doorway.
Her escape, as well as the fact that Landa seems to have a reason for letting her go, prove significant later in the film. But despite that neatly articulated continuity the opening scene feels self-contained, as do many of the memorable passages in Inglourious Basterds. Because Tarantino’s talents shine brightest in the construction of sequences that could be excerpted on YouTube without losing their power, Inglourious Basterds is a film whose parts are somehow greater than their sum.
But that isn’t necessarily a drawback. Tarantino clearly aspires to produce memorable work. And the memories burned most deeply into our brain are usually the sort, as psychoanalysis teaches, that are too powerful to slot into a clearly defined chronology. They burst through whatever mental dams have been set up to hold them in place, flooding places with which they have no obvious connection. If Inglourious Basterds is a film that you can’t stop thinking about, even if it’s only in bits and pieces, Tarantino has achieved his artistic goals.
Whether those are the right artistic goals is another matter. His two-part opus Kill Bill is more fragmentary than Inglourious Basterds. But because Kill Bill is a tribute to Asian martial arts pictures famous for the skimpiness of their plots, lack of cohesion is excusable. In taking on World War II and, implicitly, the Holocaust, Inglourious Basterds invites a degree of moral scrutiny that Tarantino’s choice of genres previously helped him avoid. The fact that he continues to project the image of an insouciant amateur movie fan rather than a disciplined director, even when handling such historically delicate material, compounds the trouble.
Despite the obvious care with which Inglourious Basterds is put together – the period details in the mise-en-scene are fantastic – it still can feel cartoonish at times. The heightened sense of reality that makes the best scenes so memorable actually undermines the film’s realism as a whole. It’s the psychological equivalent of a 3-D movie, so visceral that it can seem fake. But the distance that our proximity to danger paradoxically affords us actually might be a boon. Leaving aside the question of whether anyone would want to see a Quentin Tarantino picture besotted by its own probity, the film’s volatile subject matter, which comes “pre-heightened” even before any artist seeks to heighten it, actually might be better served by his insistence on putting style before substance.
The Jewish Thing To Do?
Have his critics noticed? Tarantino has received his best reviews since Pulp Fiction, in addition to unexpectedly large box office numbers. His career, recently thought to be in trouble, is back on track. But Inglourious Basterds has still provoked the same misgivings as Tarantino’s previous directorial efforts. Some worry that its depiction of violence is excessive, others that the humor that leavens that violence might deaden viewers’ moral sensitivity. But because this is a story in which Jews take revenge on their oppressors, other concerns have come to the fore. The most heated objections to the film have come from those who worry that it makes viewers identify with characters in troubling ways. Interestingly, this charge has been levied from opposing ideological camps. Whether supporters of Israel or the sort of progressive intellectuals who relentlessly point out its failings, critics have argued that the film makes revenge too sweet.
There is nothing in the narrative to imply that the Germans in the film, most of them high-ranking Nazis, deserve sympathy for their plight. Nevertheless, the unorthodox practices of the primarily American commando unit known as the “Inglourious Basterds” – scalping their kills and carving a swastika on the foreheads of any survivors – have troubled those who believe that the distinction between “us” and “them” must encompass methodology as well as ideology.
In a fine piece for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg expresses admiration for the film and its director, yet seems most insistent on arguing that it could never have been made by a Jew. “Given the chance, of course, I would still shoot Mengele in the face. That would be a moral necessity. But I wouldn’t carve a swastika into his forehead. That just doesn’t sound like the Jewish thing to do.” Goldberg is less bothered by the brutality of Tarantino’s “anti-Nazi excesses” in the abstract than his sense that they run the risk of inspiring sympathy for Germans who don’t deserve it. Presumably, the “Jewish thing to do” would involve preventing audiences from identifying with their persecutors’ suffering.
The Nazi Character
While it may seem silly, not to mention offensive, to complain that the film treats its antagonists too harshly, the charge illuminates a crucial dilemma facing those who depict the Third Reich. Stories in which only the good guys are fleshed out tend to fall flat. But attempts to correct this imbalance run the risk of imbuing perpetrators of the vilest imaginable acts with the very humanity they ruthlessly denied their victims. As Nazis have evolved from the stock villains of B-movies to a wider range of possible characters, understandable anxieties about normalizing German atrocities have surfaced.
To the extent that Nazi characters transcend the standardization of villainy that was once their postwar cinematic lot, in which most wearers of the Hakenkreuz were functionally interchangeable, and become distinct individuals, they elicit more complex forms of identification. Even if a character is identified as a worthy opponent, though one who must be vanquished at all costs, the reflexes of the battleground give way to more nuanced reflections on his personality. Once the goal is to outwit rather than outshoot the enemy, the dehumanization of modern warfare begins to lose its sway.
In theory, this may seem like a salutary goal. But its advocates face a conundrum. Is it better to kill people whose humanity goes unacknowledged or ones who remain in the crosshairs despite being recognized as individuals? Although legal precedent suggests that the former is preferable – soldiers are rarely prosecuted for taking the lives of other soldiers – the ethical folds of the question are not so easy to lay flat. Indeed, the popularity of fictional narratives in which a military opponent passes from anonymity to familiarity betrays deep-seated reservations about masses, even those comprised of one’s mortal enemies.
If You’ve Seen One Stormtrooper, You’ve Seen Them All
But
there are two major problems with perceiving your enemies as
individuals. If you persist in trying to destroy them, success can feel
too much like murder. There’s a scene in Inglourious Basterds in
which a German officer, regular army rather than SS, refuses to
tell the commandos, who have just slaughtered his the men under his command, where a
sister unit is positioned on the map. In theory, such loyalty and
courage are commendable, if misguided. But the Basterds have no
interest in the honor of the battlefield. They delight in the officer’s
refusal because it means that the “Bear Jew,” a hulking man played by
horror film director Eli Roth, can beat him into a pulp with his trusty
baseball bat, a grisly spectacle from which the camera does not cut
away.
Because we have noted the steely determination in the German officer's face, a face that literally disappears under the force of Bear Jew’s blows, the impact of the scene is especially brutal. Even if the violence feels satisfying to viewers who identify with the assassin’s vengeful glee, pangs of conscience are hard to suppress. But the Basterds’ mission doesn’t allow for second thoughts. If recognizing opponents’ humanity makes you hesitate, they might well kill you first. For those who lack the resolve of those commandos, however, the best survival mechanism may be to pretend that the faces of the enemy have already disappeared. There is safety in reducing one’s opponents to components of an impersonal mass.
One of the best cinematic examples of this pragmatic approach to war can be found in the Star Wars films, in which the identical white suits of the Imperial stormtroopers – a term George Lucas chose with a keen sense of his tale’s cinematic ancestry – so hard and glossy that they hide all traces of humanity, remain inviolate even when their occupants go down in battle. Since viewers never get to see the fallen warriors inside – or even perceive a change of state through damage to the suits themselves – it is impossible to identify them as individuals and, as a consequence, to identify with them.
Although the first Star Wars film – subsequently reclassified as the fourth episode in a sextet – was released in the 1970s, a decade that saw representations of the Third Reich become less monolithic, it represents a throwback to the clear-cut moral universe of those postwar B-movies in which Germans were barely even characters, automatons who were either to be evaded or destroyed, period. While comforting for children, who prefer their badness without ambiguity, this failure to differentiate among enemies had disturbing implications for those grown-ups who welcomed the opportunity to enjoy war narratives without a guilty conscience. At a time when films like Coming Home, The Deerhunter, and Apocalypse Now were winning acclaim for their depressing depiction of the Viet Nam War’s psychological legacy, Star Wars took viewers back to a simpler time when dispatching enemy soldiers was a cause for celebration rather than a crisis of confidence.
The Reach of Reagan
Regardless
of George Lucas’s politics, presumed to be of the wishy-washy liberal
sort associated with the San Francisco Bay Area, his franchise laid the
cultural groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s cinematically savvy reactionary
program.
Not only did Reagan reject the legacy of the 1960s at the level of
policy, he also rejected the way that crucial decade was being
represented in film.
His political genius was most evident in his capacity to recognize that most Americans, even those opposed to his conservative ideology, were starving for villains they could root against with a clear conscience. His declarations about the “Evil Empire” and regular invocation of World War II films went hand in hand, crucial components of a project to replace the disenchanted relativism of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era with the high-contrast moral code found in traditional war movies and Westerns.
Ultimately, though, the end of the Cold War made Reagan’s map of the world obsolete before younger generations had fully absorbed its implications. Ever since, politicians in the West have been struggling, with only limited success, to fit dictators and terrorists from the developing world into SS uniforms. Ordinary citizens of the United States, Britain or Japan may recognize the danger these global outcasts pose to world peace. They may even agree with the notion that these men are the embodiment of evil. But the notion that they are somehow Nazis returned from the dead has not really stuck.
The recent Norwegian zombie film Dead Snow cleverly makes light of this failure by suggesting that even frozen, undead Nazis come much closer to the ideal than current pretenders to the throne of evil. Their flesh may be coming off in chunks. Their plan of attack may be lacking in subtlety. But their uniforms still fit the way the tailor intended. Compared to the military discipline these zombines exhibit, evident in a steadfast refusal to take death lying down, the schemes of impoverished Muslim college students in Oslo, Paris or Amsterdam seem hopelessly inept.
Perhaps it’s not that the term “Nazi” has failed to stick, but rather that it has become temporarily affixed to so many different places that most of its historical significance has evaporated. Once politicians have suggested that turbaned religious zealots, perverted oligarchs and drug-trafficking tribesmen are all current-day “Nazis,” despite the fact they neither look nor act like the stereotype, it doesn’t take much of a push to get ideologues to label anyone they oppose fascists.
The radical Left was fond of doing this during the heyday of the counterculture, one of its most shameful legacies. The difference back then was
that World War II was still close enough for such exaggerations to be
countered by personal testimony of those who had lived through the Third Reich. These days, when those who were adults during the 1940s are already well into their eighth decade,
such witnessing is becoming increasingly rare. Both the war and the
Holocaust are passing into a netherland where historical evidence blurs
with cinematic reconstruction to such a degree that young people find
it difficult to make contact with the reality behind the representations.
This may be why Tarantino chose to turn his latest genre exercise into a project with much higher stakes. Or perhaps he’s simply young enough himself to intuitively demonstrate what others struggle to pin down. Either way, Inglourious Basterds is a perfect example of how the injunction to always remember is being transformed by the diminishment of living memory. Hitler remains the archetype of the greatest cinematic villainy, as readily identifiable as Mickey Mouse or Marilyn Monroe. But, like those products of the Hollywood dream factory, he inhabits a realm where the facts of history are a secondary concern.
Birth of a Nation
That Tarantino is a true scholar of cinema should be apparent to anyone who notices the way his films pay homage to their predecessors. Reservoir Dogs references a wide range of heist films. Jackie Brown reprises so many highlights of blaxploitation flicks from the 1970s that you can forget it was made in the 1990s. And Kill Bill at times seems more like a catalogue of cool martial arts films than a coherent narrative. Because Tarantino is so attentive to the nuances of genre, paying as much attention to obscure B-movies as he does to canonical favorites, it's easy to forget that this narrow-spectrum expertise, the province of fan boys and girls, is complemented by a broad engagement with film as a medium. Just because he worked in a video store doesn't mean that his knowledge can be reduced to trivia. Like Martin Scorcese, his passion for cinema can seem indiscriminate, quick to find something to love in pictures that aren't easy to like. But that doesn't mean that his postmodern aesthetic is shallow.
Inglourious Basterds certainly follows in the footsteps of Tarantino's previous work in paying loving tribute to classic war films and “Spaghetti” spins on Hollywood formula. But because it's also the story of how lovers of film – French and German, Jew and Nazi – are brought together before the silver screen, Tarantino invites us to reflect on cinematic history as a whole. In one sense, he has simply made another film about films. Because of the subject matter, however, and the fact that he opts to bring his narrative to a climax inside a movie theater, the self-reflexivity that always lurks just beneath the surface of his work has become both more obvious and more profound.
Tarantino’s script plays so fast and loose with history, imagining an end to the Third Reich more dramatically satisfying than what actually happened, that it begs comparison to another historical film that was praised for its stylistic panache: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 feature Birth of a Nation. Although protested by the NAACP and sympathetic white intellectuals for its egregious bias against African-Americans, the film was a tremendous success. Audiences eager to heal the wounds of the Civil War thrilled at the opportunity to identify with both Union and Confederate protagonists, even if that symbolic reconciliation depended on the intesification of white supremacy. That this reconciliation also required the distortion of historical fact didn’t seem to bother most viewers either.
Because of the shorter average lifespan in the early twentieth century, Birth of a Nation shares with Inglourious Basterds the status of being a film about historical events that are no longer remembered by most of the population. Although President Woodrow Wilson, for whom Birth of a Nation was screened in the White House, probably did not make the famous declaration that it was “history written with lightning”, the statement does a beautiful job of capturing film’s power to promote revisionist history. As Thomas Dixon, the author of the unabashedly racist novel on which Birth of a Nation was based, explained, “I didn’t dare allow the President to know the real big purpose back of my film – which was to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . . What I told the President was that I would show him the birth of a new art – the launching of the mightiest engine for moulding public opinion in the history of the world.”
Perpetual Revenge
That’s what critics who complain that Inglourious Basterds is pro-Israeli are picking up on. Even if they are willing to concede Goldberg’s point that the excessive violence in the film may not be a “Jewish thing to do,” they insist that it's most definitely a Zionist thing to do. From their perspective, fantasies of revenge have played a crucial role in postwar Jewish politics. The pride taken in the IDF’s battlefield triumphs; the reluctance to make concessions to the Palestinians, despite intense international pressure; the doggedness with which both surviving Nazis and the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre were hunted down: all can be regarded as evidence of precisely the we’re-not-going-to-take-it-anymore mindset that defines the renegades who comprise the Inglourious Basterds.
There’s a difference, of course, between revenging yourself directly on an oppressor and the pursuit of compensatory satisfaction in another setting. The latter is rather unseemly, like the actions of a boy who, humiliated by a schoolyard bully, takes his frustrations out on smaller children he can safely dominate. Critics of Israel’s foreign and domestic policy have charged that many of its most impressive military achievements – taking out Iraqi nuclear facilities, destroying Hamas hideouts with precision bombing – are the result of an overwhelming technological and financial superiority that significantly tarnishes their luster.
From this perspective, Inglourious Basterds seems dangerous because it uses a World War II narrative to fortify fantasies with disturbing present-day consequences. Goldberg explains the film’s visceral appeal for Jewish audiences – or at least Jewish male audiences – by emphasizing the transgressive pleasure it elicits. He quotes Eli Roth: “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling.” Tarantino’s longtime producer Lawrence Bender reinforces this troubling conflation of sex and revenge by recounting a conversation he had with the director. “‘As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.’”
While such dreams may prove harmless enough when confined to the bedroom or shower, there’s always the chance that they will bolster the impetus for taking action in the real world, where true Nazis are in relatively short supply but plenty of convenient surrogates are waiting to take their psychic place. At least that’s the conclusion reached by those who fret that Inglorious Basterds reinforces the ideology of the pre-emptive strike, offense as the only defense worth having. It’s vital, they insist, to distinguish between revenge that looks to the past, seeking redress for an injury, and the sort of pre-meditated violence that looks to the future, securing advance compensation for an injury that has yet to occur. Once people are no longer able to tell the difference, they are at the mercy of demagogues.
Identifying the Bodies
What these opposing concerns about Tarantino’s approach underscore is the extent to which Inglourious Basterds exposes new wrinkles in the problem of identification. A staple of the abstract film theory that swept scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, this topic has taken a back seat in recent years to work of narrower conceptual scope. Histories are in, while sweeping claims about the ahistorical cinematic apparatus are out. The irony in this development, however, is that it is precisely in self-consciously historical films and, more specifically, those that tackle the subjects of World War II and the Holocaust, that the structural workings of film are easiest to discern.
Playwright Bertolt Brecht’s insight that the dominant experience of drama in the West revolves around identification with characters is never more apparent than when watching a conventional war film, in which viewers are given the tools to discern distinct individuals within the masses of people on screen and then get to follow those individuals through a sequence of events that repeatedly threatens to return them to anonymity. Indeed, it’s no accident that such films often linger on dead bodies waiting to be identified. The inhumanity of modern warfare inheres in its capacity to render not only soldiers, but also civilians functionally equivalent.
But this specter of becoming “mass” men and women, deprived of character, is more insidious than that, for it goes hand in hand with tremendous advances in the capacity to identify people negatively, as members of a category being discriminated against. Again and again World War II films have presented characters living in Occupied Europe or trapped behind enemy lines who desperately hope that their disguise, their forged papers, their accent don’t give them away. Even as their plight reduces them to mere shadows, barely able to sustain their humanity, they live in fear of being singled out. And moviegoers, themselves part of an anonymous mass, identify with that fear. They want to disappear into the crowd, even as they long to shore up their selfhood by bonding with protagonists on the screen.
It’s no accident that the climactic scene of Inglourious Basterds takes place in a cinema where some members of the audience fear being detected as imposters and others luxuriate in the false confidence that fills moviegoers when the lights go down. This is the rare film that manages to be ruthlessly self-reflexive without ever making you feel the presence of the mirror. Even a seasoned cinephile, primed to make careful note of every scene in which characters are making a movie or watching a film, will have a hard time wriggling free of the identification that subordinates mind to body. The film’s key scenes, including the remarkable climax, are simply too thrilling, too viscerally realized to appraise with detachment during a first screening.
The Roller Coaster of History Is a Moebius Strip
That’s part of what makes the film what the hippies liked to call a “head trip.” By the time the viewer reaches the end of that climactic scene, the sense of being strapped into an amusement park thrill ride is so overwhelming that the film’s blatant rewriting of history feels like a higher order of truth. Some commentators on Inglourious Basterds have wryly noted that Americans learn so little history in school that Tarantino’s reckless gambit might go unnoticed. Perhaps that’s the case. But it’s also not hard to understand how moviegoers who know perfectly well how World War II ended might still find themselves transported, if only temporarily, to a twilight zone where Hitler never made it to his bunker. Just as many otherwise progressive Americans in 1915 were temporarily won over by the storytelling brilliance of Birth of a Nation, contemporary viewers can be persuaded to suspend their disbelief in exchange for narrative bliss.
In writing his screenplay Tarantino surely had the long-delayed Valkyrie project in mind, which tells the story of a nearly successful attempt to assassinate the Führer in the summer of 1944. The difference is that his “alternate ending” is pure fiction, as deliberately skewed as the Thomas Dixon story told in Birth of a Nation. But whereas Dixon sought to influence public opinion to advance an odious political agenda, Tarantino’s purpose is more complex. As the director has repeatedly noted in interviews, he thought it was high time for Jews to escape the role of victim meted out to them in one Holocaust narrative after another. But it’s doubful that his primary goal was to create a kind of political Viagra to bolster Israeli militarism. More likely, he wanted both to show how Israel became the state that it is today and deftly suggest, by telling a story in which a few stalwart Jews practically get to defeat the Nazis all by themselves, that it’s time for the nation to adopt a new narrative.
Hitler Just Isn’t What He Used To Be
There’s a reason why the scene in which the Bear Jew empties round after round into Hitler’s corpse is so disturbing. Even as viewers share in his rapture, it’s hard not get the sense that this climax – his climax, to build on Eli Roth’s metaphor – is one that can only be repeated with diminishing returns. While the increasing frequency with which terms like “national socialism” and “fascism” have been invoked in recent years indicate that World War II is very much on people’s minds, the sheer variety and frequency of the references attest to a precipitous decline in their historical relevance.
Perhaps the best example of this development, as exhilarating as it is disturbing, is in the curious afterlife of the 2006 German film Downfall about Hitler’s last days in the bunker. The product of painstaking research, full of spot-on period details, the film was both praised and maligned for its attempts to be historically accurate. In particular, many critics criticized the film for making Hitler and his associates too human.
By confining the narrative to the final days of a lost cause, Downfall’s creators constructed the perfect breeding ground for melodrama. Even though Hitler is clearly mad and his associates mostly venal and inept, their dire predicament and the time viewers spend with them in the claustrophobically close quarters of the bunker elicit a kind of structural identification, a sympathy in spite of itself à la the famous “Stockholm Syndrome”, that threatens to conceal the magnitude of their crimes. At least, that’s what Downfall’s critics have charged.
The most interesting thing about the film, though, is that it has given rise to one of the most persistent and inventive memes on the internet. The scene in which Hitler finally realizes that his forces have been utterly defeated, first in a fit of rage and then a mood of bitter resignation, has been posted many times to YouTube with new subtitles added for humorous effect. In these guerrilla clips, the actor Bruno Ganz’s over-the-top performance is appropriated for rants of all stripes, from a Republican’s lament that Sarah Palin is leaving the governorship in Alaska to a tirade about Michael Jackson's untimely death to froth-mouthed fury about a professional football player's decision to come out of retirement.
Whether this rebranding of Hitler’s image as the stand-in for any authority figure losing his grip constitutes a new example of the banality of evil or merely a sign that history isn’t what it used to be, we have clearly entered an era in which people surfing the internet can find themselves amusingly diverted by identifying with the figure of the Führer for a few minutes. From that perspective, Inglourious Basterds’ insistence that we remember to keep the Nazis in our sights and take pleasure in their destruction can seem downright moral.
But what makes Tarantino’s film, as its final lines imply, his “masterpiece” is not its morality so much as the way it invites us to think about morality. By making us feel the power of identification that the medium of film makes possible, as well as the consequences to which that spectatorial bondage can lead, Inglourious Basterds demonstrates how cinema makes history. The challenge it sets us is to become producers of that history, like that teenage girl who flees through the meadow at the end of the film’s opening scene, only to become first the owner of a cinema and then the principal agent of the Third Reich’s destruction.
Charlie Bertsch is Zeek's Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same position at Tikkun. He was also a longtime contributor to Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He is working on several book projects, as both a writer and an editor. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.
Charles Freeman and His Curious Defenders |
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by Michael Weiss, March 10, 2009 |
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The controversy that has engulfed that now
all-but-scuttled appointment of Charles Freeman to the post of National
Intelligence Council leader is, I think, a bellwether moment for what
today passes for “progressive” opinion. The fashionable charge,
leveled by many leftish commentators (mainly in cyberspace), that group
of hawkish Jewish pundits have got Israel on the brain and will
sacrifice every other question of U.S. foreign policy to this
monomaniacal subject appears now to be an acute form of projection.
When it was disclosed, for instance, that Freeman, president to the
Middle East Policy Council and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was
the recipient of $1 million of Saudi largesse, and has been a rather
outspoken apologist for the kingdom – he referred at one point to its
King Abdullah as “Abdullah the Great”– the expected liberal response to
this would have been a raised eyebrow. Why would the Obama
administration, foe of torture and the erasures of civil liberties at
home, be amenable to an analyst who has clearly not done much analysis
abroad?
Saudi Arabia is founded on Wahhabist Islamic
doctrine designed as a means of social control. Its media is state-run,
its women are forced to take the veil, Jews from other countries are
forbidden entry, and its homosexuals are executed in the capital in a
place colloquially known as “Chop-Chop Square” (whose name tells you
enough about the means of execution). The Saudi monarchy, despite its
declared antipathy to Islamic fundamentalism, underwrites particularly
toxic and anti-Semitic editions of the Koran, many of which find their way into American prisons and international madrasas that graduate Islamic terrorists.
As it happens, Freeman himself has played a part in publishing propaganda about Islam and the Middle East. According
to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Middle East Policy Council helped
put out an “Arab World Studies Notebook” for use in U.S. schools:
“In the version examined [in 2005] by JTA staff, the "Notebook" described Jerusalem as unequivocally "Arab," deriding Jewish residence in the city as "settlement"; cast the "question of Jewish lobbying" against "the whole question of defining American interests and concerns"; and suggested that the Koran "synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations."
Leave aside the ethnographical and political dubiousness of that
paragraph (Jerusalem has never been wholly “Arab,” even when it was
controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and a Jewish lobby “defining”
American interests is more categorical a judgment, you'll agree, than
its unduly influencing American interests). If one were to assess
Freeman’s viability for the NIC chairmanship only from the standpoint
of national security, how would one look on his endorsement of the very
sort of religious chauvinism (“perfects earlier revelations”) that our
soft and hard power apparatuses are now marshaled to combat? The
equivalent would be hiring a Sovietologist during the Cold War who
consented to the belief that Kapital was the final word on all matters pertaining to political economy.
Yet here is how M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum reacted to news of Freeman’s Saudi affinity on Talking Points Memo:
So what if Freeman is close to the Saudis. Why should that disqualify him for the intelligence post? Unless he has done something unethical or illegal, these smears are more evidence (if any more is needed) that being deemed overly critical of the occupation is today's equivalent of being called a Communist in 1953. It's a career killer, used to ensure that policymakers adhere to the neocon line."
The “occupation” here refers to the one maintained by Israel over
Palestine, and by “overly critical” Rosenberg means Freeman applauds
the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis that the U.S. alliance with the Jewish
state is undeviating and self-defeating and only driven by an obsessive
lobby made up of Jewish and Christian Zionists. Mearsheimer and Walt’s
careers have never been better since they published their notorious
essay, which the Middle East Policy Council also ran in an unexpurgated
version. Freeman found the authors "brave," and the fact that their
scholarship was widely discredited across the political
spectrum—including within the “realist” establishment from which M-W
claim discipleship—impinges not at all on their courage, of course.
Freeman today thinks that because Israel is the bête noir of the Arab
world, supporting it means “universalizing anti-Americanism” and
incurring more terrorist attacks against the U.S., but this is a belief
he did not always hold. In 1998, he was of the opinion that
Mr. bin Laden's principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.
Bin Laden would, by this assessment, have a serious grievance with
enthusiasts for the Saudi regime, making Freeman and his ilk part of
the problem, no?
Now, it would be easy to
file Rosenberg’s emission as a one-off were it not so characteristic of
a broader leftish response to Freeman’s appointment. The Center for
American Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias also welcomed the addition
of this lifelong Republican, classifying circulated concerns about
Freeman’s fitness for the NIC chair as a “war” initiated by those who
suffering from a blindingly pro-Israel bias. Citing the Jewish sources
for the contra position (these include Marty Peretz and Jonathan Chait,
both of the New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard), Yglesias wrote:
“I’m not sure whether or not the Obama administration will ultimately
stand behind Freeman. I hope they will. But whether or not they do, I
think it’s very clear that the lesson here is that if you’re a veteran
policy hand who hopes to return to government one day and you believe
something that you think AIPAC wouldn’t approve of, that the smart
thing to do is to keep those views to yourself.”
AIPAC didn’t
approve of Hillary Clinton’s public smooch of Suha Arafat in 1999, and
it doesn’t much approve of her proposed aid package to Gaza now. But
there she still is, a high-octane secretary of state. As for the
official AIPAC comment on Freeman, as of this writing, it consists of no comment at all.
(Steve Rosen, a former AIPAC official who was charged with spying on
behalf of Israel, and another former anonymous AIPAC member did speak
out against Freeman. If their being voluble only as ex-officials
testifies to anything, then it is to the restraining nature of that
organization.)
As for the appointee’s own disclosed
statements on Israel, these have not been so terribly shocking to
anyone who follows the debate closely, an admission the JTA (one of
Yglesias’s bugbears of Zionist-orchestrated career destruction)
explained in the article I quoted earlier. His late-formed belief that
reducing terror attacks against Americans is moored to a resolution of
the Arab-Israeli conflict -- a prescription sometimes derided as the
"Jerusalem Syndrome" -- was the position maintained by James Baker and
Lee Hamilton in their Iraq Study Group Report, a white paper
commissioned by the Bush administration and thankfully unheeded over
the ultimately successful "surge" strategy. That Freeman managed to
retain the aura of bureaucratic respectability while holding such
traditional realist positions attests more to the endurance of those
positions than it does to his ability to pass himself off as something
he is not. He believes himself to be a true Burkean conservative when
in fact he is an “ideological fanatic,” as Chait rightly put it in the Washington Post. Sometimes – just sometimes – ideological fanatics don’t write for Commentary or the Weekly Standard.
Do Rosenberg and Yglesias really believe that Freeman’s compromising
“closeness” to Saudi Arabia is only a threat to Israel and that alarm
over this proximity is the exclusive property of a dislodged cadre of
policy intellectuals or an ethnic lobby? That would mean that Craig
Unger’s bestselling critique of the Bush family’s warm relationship to
the House of Saud and Michael Moore’s darkly traced filiations between
Riyadh and Halliburton have now metamorphosed into Mossad conspiracies.
It would also mean that the amnesiac left is now intent on doing what
no one would have thought it capable of eight years ago: retroactively
rehabilitating the legacy of George H.W. Bush.
If Rosenberg
means to say that a tendency towards a foreign government does not
necessarily impair one’s ability to think strategically on behalf of
the United States then I wonder how dispassionately he would react if
it were discovered that the NIC appointee regularly vacationed with
Avigdor Lieberman, or was the head of a think tank that received a
generous endowment from Benjamin Netanyahu.
Interesting,
too, that those who have tossed around the “McCarthyite” label were
quick to accuse Freeman’s opponents of harboring dual loyalties or
engaging in "smear" campaigns. This was Stephen Walt’s tack in a
Foreign Policy blog post wince-makingly titled “Have they not a shred of decency?,”
in which he cited, without a whiff of irony, Jeffrey Goldberg’s former
service in the IDF as a sign of his un-American motive for questioning
the patriotism of one Charles Freeman. (Though in his sentimental comparison of Freeman to blacklisted
Communists the supposedly hard-headed Walt does tacitly allow that
Freeman's political views are troublesome.)
The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss, who also warned
of a "coordinated" neoconservative assault, goes further in his defense
of Freeman, stating that he "is a one-of-a-kind choice: with an
impeccably establishment pedigree, Freeman has developed over the years
a startling propensity to speak truth to power, which is precisely what
one would want in a NIC chairman." I had not known until now that The Nation esteems establishment pedigrees and believes oil-rich sheiks are latterday wretched of the earth.
Leftists
who praise Freeman on the single issue of Israel-Palestine, ostensibly
out of a concern for justice and human rights, say it’s beside the
point to confront his endless euphemisms and evasions on other human
rights abuses. An unintended consequence of
this maneuver is that these same leftists appear even more obsessed
with the Jewish state than do the “neocons" they purport to monitor.
They also look especially stupid in this instance because they're
effectively arguing that what goes on in the West Bank is more crucial
to U.S. national security than what goes on in the one country which
produced fifteen out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. How's that for
realism?
As it happens, Saudi Arabia is not the only
oligarchy toward which Freeman has a strong tropism. Here is what he
had to say, on a 2006 listserv, about the Tiananmen Square massacre of
1989, and it's worth keeping Dreyfuss' "truth to power" encomium in
mind:
I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than -- as would have been both wise and efficacious -- to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo's response to the mob scene at "Tian'anmen" stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action.
For myself, I side on this -- if not on numerous other issues -- with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans' "Bonus Army" or a "student uprising" on behalf of "the goddess of democracy" should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government's normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang's dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.
This is why Human Rights Watch – evidently the latest bastion of neoconservative dogmatism, as Reason’s left-libertarian editor Matt Welch mordantly observed
– opposes Freeman’s appointment. It’s also why 87 Chinese dissidents
have written President Obama protesting it without so much as a winking
allusion to Oslo or road-maps.
As for Rosenberg and Yglesias,
where they do concede Freeman’s ugly c.v. it is more out of cynical
(and partisan) resignation than real horror. Yglesias helpfully admits
that defending Freeman on principle is not a cause he wishes to stake
his bloggerly reputation on. (That might hurt his career more than
rebuking AIPAC.) But this grudging concession was then followed by
another change of subject: back to the motives that impelled the
discovery of Freeman’s China problem in the first place.
Andrew Sullivan, who himself has come around to legitimizing the Mearsheimer-Walt perspective on his popular blog, assembled a time-line of Freeman complaints, demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the chorus of criticism did indeed begin with Israel. Yet left out of Sullivan's recapitulation of events is Eli Lake's Washington Times coverage of Freeman's unexamined foreign ties, a series of articles that provided the journalistic cui bono for vetting further a man tasked with compiling the nation's annual intelligence estimates. (Lake's biggest scoop, in fact, was showing that the White House had not even been privy to Freeman's appointment; Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair undertook it autonomously, according to Blair's spokesman Wendy Morigi.)
So it must be out of willful credulity that Rosenberg emailed Jeffrey Goldberg:
None of the bloggers in question had any interest in Freeman's views on China until Steve Rosen (and some of his colleagues) decided to stir up the opposition to Freeman because of his alleged lack of fidelity to the occupation. In fact, I hear that the offending China quotes were only discovered in the context of a Google Nexis/Lexis search to find incriminating material to block Freeman's appointment because of his Middle East views. China was not even an afterthought.
The Weekly Standard first uncovered
the Tiananmen Square excerpt (not using Google or Nexis/Lexis, by the
way), and that magazine has in the past run editorials calling for
continued U.S. trade restrictions on China on the basis of its
appalling human rights record. To my knowledge, this policy has no
discernible link to Jerusalem, although it
does tend to chivvy die-hard Nixonians who believe morality has no
place in foreign policy calculations.
In Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin tells of how the search for Chaney, Goodman and Schwirner proceeded in Mississippi. The police had to drag the lake in which the bodies of these murdered civil rights activists were rumored to have been dumped. The police didn’t discover those bodies, but they did discover other corpses no one had been seeking. Does it not miss the point to focus on what motivated Freeman's detractors from doing due diligence on him when he is provably an inveterate excuse-maker for totalitarianism?
By way of a more immediate example: I have no idea where the Armenian lobby stands on Tiananmen Square or Saudi Arabia, but I nonetheless credit it with tipping me off to the Anti-Defamation League's denial of the Armenian genocide, an erasure of historical truth deriving from a callous geopolitical consideration--and one that benefited Israel, at least according to Abe Foxman. (James Fallows, who inveighed against a Congressional resolution acknowledging the first holocaust of the 20th century because he, too, didn't want to upset Turkey, deserves no credit for standing up for Freeman now. If this is what Fallows considers a robust "contrarianism," I prefer the tired blood of conventional wisdom, thanks.)
At minimum, this strange affair that has seen liberals and not a few conservatives joined in martyring a true reactionary has indicated the level of political maturity of a certain breed of thinker, who, still reeling from the last administration, wishes to make his sole conviction for the next one doing whatever makes the dreaded "neocons" angry. A vice of electoral victory is said to be hubris, but this reeks of insecurity. It also signals just how short-lived the left's hold on power may be.
Daily Read on the Gaza War |
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by Michael Weiss, January 16, 2009 |
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Egypt Cites Progress Toward Truce As Gaza Toll Exceeds 1,000 [New York Times]
The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, who spent Tuesday in Gaza City, agreed that the situation with civilians was dire but said that the principal hospital was making do with medical supplies, and that doctors, working around the clock, were mostly coping with the flow of the wounded.
“In general, they did not complain about the lack of equipment or material,” he said at a news conference in Jerusalem.
Palestinian sources: 'Iran unit' of Hamas has been destroyed [Haaretz]
PROFILE / Slain Hamas minister was key figure in '07 Gaza coup [Haaretz]Palestinian sources reported Thursday that the "Iranian Unit" of Hamas, members of the group's military wing trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, had been destroyed.
According to the sources, most of the unit's members were killed in fighting in the Zeytun neighborhood, where they had been deployed by the military leadership of Hamas.
The unit numbered approximately 100 men who had traveled to Iran and Hezbollah camps, mostly in the Beka'a Valley, where they were trained in infantry fighting tactics. The militants were also trained in the use of anti-tank missiles, the detonation of explosives, among other skills.
After Hamas' sweeping victory in those elections, the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah intensified. Sayyam set up the Executive Force, a security apparatus that developed into Hamas' police after the militants seized Gaza in June 2007.
An open letter to Gideon Levy, by A.B. Yehoshua [Haaretz]
When I asked you after the disengagement from Gaza, Gideon, explain to me why they are firing missiles at us, you replied that they want us to open the crossings. I asked you whether you truly believe that if they fire missiles the crossings will be opened, or the opposite. And whether you truly believe that it is right and just to open crossings into Israel for those who declare openly and sincerely that they want to destroy our country. I did not get an answer from you.
ANALYSIS / Egypt's Gaza truce plan is mostly bad for Hamas [Haaretz]
Cabinet to decide on unilateral ceasefire Saturday evening [Jerusalem Post]The Egyptian proposal is mostly bad for Hamas. It doesn't let the organization bring the Palestinian public any political achievement that would justify the blood that has been spilled, and even forces on it the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, in the form of its renewed presence at the Rafah crossing (as a condition for its reopening).
Once the cease-fire is reached, the IDF will withdraw from the positions it captured in Gaza, and only then will the two sides begin to discuss the opening of border crossings and removal of the blockade, which was the reason Hamas gave for waging war. The most that Cairo is offering is a timetable for the opening of the crossing points, and even that depends on negotiations due to begin after the cease-fire is reached, and it's tough to know how or when they will end.
According to Reuters, the main points disputed in the Egyptian proposal as it was articulated on Thursday were the duration of the proposed truce, which Hamas insists on being only a year, and how quickly Israel would complete the withdrawal of its forces from the Gaza Strip and reopen the crossings. The PMO statement on Friday expressed satisfaction with clarifications Gilad received from Cairo on Friday.
Olmert also does not want any agreement to include Hamas as a direct party because this would de facto legitimize the group. His preference, According to Channel 10, was to conclude a ceasefire "over Hamas's head" regardless of the terror group's position, working with Egypt and the US.
Ed Zwick on Passivity, Jewish Power, and Hamas [Jeffrey Goldberg]
The Things They Carried [Yossi Klein Halevi, The New Republic]Jeffrey Goldberg: You're opening in Europe. We've heard a lot of talk in Europe comparing what Israel does in the Occupied Territories to what the Nazis did to the Jews. Are you worried about the way the movie will be understood in Europe right now?
Edward Zwick: You know, the argument comparing what the Jews are doing and what the Nazis did is just such a preposterous exaggeration, because one when one uses the word genocide, you have to ask: If Israel were interested in genocide than they have more than the means necessary to accomplish such a thing, and given that, in context, they're using a certain amount of restraint. Yes, I know the word "restraint" is hard to talk about, given what's happening in Gaza, but it is a type of restraint. What I'm responding to is equivalence. Words are important. Genocide is a word thrown around too easily. This is happening now in Poland and Lithuania. There's an attempt to make an equivalence between alleged war crimes of the Bielskis and the Holocaust.
Outside, at a picnic table, a group of reservists, some wearing woolen caps against the night chill, are engaged in a venerable IDF ritual: boiling Turkish coffee in a finjan, a small tin pot. They offer us shot glasses filled with coffee. Some of them are students, some work in high tech. A young man with a shaved head joins us. "He's from the CIA," someone says. "Chef In Action," the guy with the shaved head explains the joke. He is in fact a chef in one of Tel Aviv's up-and-coming restaurants. "We hear the food there is nothing to get excited about," someone says. "Not like what we get here."
No Peace with Hamas |
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by Josh Strawn, January 15, 2009 |
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Jeff Goldberg's insightful-as-usual op-ed the New York Times, while filled with informative anecdotal nuggets aplenty, could actually have been trimmed to consist of only the headline, "Why Israel Can't Make Peace With Hamas," and this: "A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks." Boiling down the entire conflict isn't this simple, but boiling down Hamas is. Either one believes that God transforms this or that group of people into zoo rabble or one does not. One who does cannot be credited with having the faculties necessary to carry out negotiations meaningfully.
To go one step further, the above formulation also answers those who would have us believe that the superstitious extremism of Hamas is so much rhetorical garnish on what is actually a material struggle for justice by people who would be more moderate if only they were treated better. Suppose it is. In that case, what would have to be admitted is that Hamas cynically utilizes the most abhorrently racist passages available to them in order to rouse the people into a righteous anger in the hopes it will beget insurrection. In which case could one devoted to the cause of justice for the Palestinians endorse or defend such a group? If the choice is between column a.) cartoonish ignorance, and column b.) calculated hate-peddling, why not choose column c.) neither?
Again, this is why the Arab-Israeli conflict is so often misconstrued by those who portray it through the lenses of tolerance or sophisticated liberal theology. Goldberg points out that what exists in the Gaza conflict is a hotbed of envy, sectarian schism, one-upsmanship and proxy influence. If each of these is a fire burning out of control, taking seriously God's having turned Jews into pigs is but one of many (on both sides of the divide--remember there are raving messianic Jews as well) ideas that function like the equivalent of kerosene mixed with gasoline mixed with napalm jelly.
Talking seriously about real solutions requires people on all sides to subscribe wholeheartedly to reality. Who among us has seen a Jew turned into a swine, a sea divided for a fleeing tribe, or believes that any similar supernatural feat designed to favor one or another ethno-religio-cultural group took place? The first prerequisite for negotiations should be that whomever is allowed at the table answers each of these in the negative. Neither the disqualification of the likes of Nizar Rayyan from the proceedings, nor the skepticism of his ilk, should sadden anyone.
Civilian Casualties and War |
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by Michael Weiss, January 13, 2009 |
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If you haven't already done so, please read today's lead story by Adam LeBor on the definition of war crimes. Also recommended is Jeff Goldberg's latest post on the legitimacy of using civilian casualties as an indicator of their commission. Noting that so far, according to Palestinian estimates, 900 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with roughly half of them civilians, Goldberg quotes Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, who offers the following perspective drawn from the siege of Mogadishu, where 80% of the Somali deaths caused by clashes with the U.S. military were civilian:
"If you feel the need to go to war against an enemy that is not as powerful as you are, one of the tactics of the weaker party is to hide among civilians, and use the global media to advertise the horror of the onslaught. People on the receiving end of the bombs greatly exaggerate the casualties and get photographers to take the most gruesome of pictures, and at the same time, the people in charge of the stronger power try to minimize the number of casualties. If you live in a democracy, then public opinion really matters, and reports of dead children swells the criticism of the war. If you live in a dictatorship, then you don't care what the people think. Israel is a democracy and it cares about the way the rest of the world feels. It gets hurt by killing civilians, so for moral and practical reasons, they're trying very hard to avoid it."
"I believe that culpability for these casualties is very much with Hamas. Take this leader, Nizar Rayyan, who was killed with many of his children. He knew he was a target. If I knew that I was a target, I sure as hell wouldn't have my children near me. It's a horrible and cynical choice he made. But if your enemy is a sophisticated manipulator of public opinion, then this is one of the many downsides of choosing to go to war. Israel knows that."
"The parallel with Mogadishu is that gunmen in that battle hid behind walls of civilians and were aware of the restraint of the (Army) Rangers. These gunmen literally shot over the heads of civilians, or between their legs. They used women and children for this. It's mind-boggling. Some of the Rangers shot civilians, some of them inadvertently and some of them advertently. They made the choice to shoot at crowds. When a ten-year-old is running at your vehicle with an AK-47, do you shoot the kid? Yes, you shoot the kid. You have to survive. When push comes to shove, faced with the horrible dilemma with a gunman facing you, yes, you shoot. It's not just a choice about your own life. If you don't shoot, you're saying that your mission isn't important, and the lives of your fellow soldiers aren't important."
Steven Erlanger of the New York Times drew attention last Sunday to Gaza as a maze of "boobytraps and trickery," designed to kill IDF soliders while also maximizing Palestinian deaths for precisely the propaganda value Bowden indicates. Hamas militants, in clear violation of the Law of Armed Conflict, have removed their uniforms and masqueraded as civilians, conceding through cynical action a point not grasped by certain feverish critics of Israel's rules of engagement: namely that IDF soldiers do not purposefully murder Arab civilians in cold blood. Hamas has also fired on Israeli targets from schools, hospitals, mosques and other non-military sites, and it's stationed noncombatants as deflections against IAF bombardment, a stratagem which has led to at least one notable innovation in the field of what might be called non-weapon weaponry:
A new Israeli weapon, meanwhile, is tailored to the Hamas tactic of asking civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings so Israeli pilots will not bomb. The Israelis are countering with a missile designed, paradoxically, not to explode. They aim the missiles at empty areas of the roofs to frighten residents into leaving the buildings, a tactic called “a knock on the roof.”
Michael Totten, who knows something about Islamist guerrilla warfare, having lived in Lebanon during the 2006 war (which he opposed, incidentally), also directs us to a YouTube showing how Hamas rigged a zoo and school in Gaza with explosives:
Jeff Goldberg's Open Letter to the Israeli Soldier |
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by Michael Weiss, January 9, 2009 |
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Dear Soldier,
Here's the thing. You've got to help the children. You're not Hamas. You're better than Hamas. So act it. I once asked Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, the late, unlamented Hamas leader, if he would help an injured Jewish child if he came across one lying on the street. He said no. And he was a pediatrician by training.
You're not Rantisi. So when you operate, operate with the children in mind. It's a burden Hamas has placed on you -- it's no joy to fight an enemy who hides behind his children. But that's what you're facing. And when you come across scenes like the one described in this Washington Post story, help the children. Yes, I'm sure the Red Cross makes things up from time to time -- they don't like you and never have -- and I'm sure some of the Palestinian self-reporting isn't accurate, but, really -- horrible things still happen, and it's your responsiblity to protect innocent people, not make their lives even more miserable. I would refer you to this Jewish prayer for the children of Gaza. Understand its message!
If you haven't read Jeff's book Prisoners, take your cyber self to Amazon right now and buy a copy. In addition to being a terrific foreign correspondent, Jeff has a talent for spotting the absurdist details of war, a trait I can't help but add is probably genetically overdetermined in writers whose ancestry derives from the Pale of the Settlement (one thinks of Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman).
I remember hearing him speak about his experiences over a year ago in Manhattan. If you want a sense of the surrealism of the modern Middle East, consider the following anecdote he related. As a guard at Ketziot Prison in the Negev, Jeff had struck up a few odd but rewarding friendships with Fatah militants, one of whom carried the amity well beyond the walls of his cell (I'm not sure if holiday cards and birthday announcements were exchanged, but they might have been).
Years later Jeff, now an established American reporter, was traveling through the Gaza when he realized he was being followed by a car carrying some farouche, gun-wielding toughs, and that his own driver was making all the wrong turns. Having been kidnapped once before, and being well aware of how these things usually go down in Palestine, he panicked. Then he hit upon a good idea: Call his old inmate friend, who was now in a senior security position in the PLO. The guy answered right away (how's that for Jeff's press clout?), and started laughing. I have to paraphrase the conversation since my memory isn't what it used to be:
"You know I'm being followed."
"Don't worry about it."
"No, this is serious."
"I said don't worry about it."
"Wait... Did you... Are these your men? Is this my bodyguard detail?"
Laughter.
"That's so sweet!"
‘Israel is an Impossibility. It is an Offense Against God.’ |
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by Edmund Standing, January 5, 2009 |
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In a blog post at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg recalls a meeting he had with Nizar Rayyan, a Hamas leader recently killed during Operation Cast Lead.
I saw him last in Gaza two years ago, at a mosque in the Jabalya Refugee Camp … He was one of the more Islamically-learned Hamas leaders I’ve met … In particular, Rayyan was interested in the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, with a special interest in hadith that painted Jews in a negative light.
And what did this learned Hamas leader have to say?
This is what he said when I asked him if he could envision a 50-year hudna (or cease-fire) with Israel: “The only reason to have a hudna is to prepare yourself for the final battle. We don’t need 50 years to prepare ourselves for the final battle with Israel.” There is no chance, he said, that true Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. “Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God.”
I asked him if he believed, as some Hamas theologians do (and certainly as many Hezbollah leaders do) that Jews are the “sons of pigs and apes.” He gave me an interesting answer that reflects a myopic reading of the Koran. “Allah changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to reproduce. So it is not literally true that Jews today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in many different ways. They are a cursed people.”
What are our crimes? I asked Rayyan. “You are murderers of the prophets and you have closed your ears to the Messenger of Allah,” he said. “Jews tried to kill the Prophet, peace be unto him. All throughout history, you have stood in opposition to the word of God.”
And here’s some more on Rayyan from the BBC:
“We will never recognise Israel,” he told Reuters news agency in early 2007. “There is nothing called Israel, neither in reality nor in the imagination.”
[...]
When Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007, he said there would be no dialogue with Fatah, the secular Palestinian movement it ousted, “only the sword and the rifle”.
Operation Cast Lead was launched to combat men like Rayyan, someone who drew his inspiration not simply from injustices against Palestinians but from an extreme and vitriolic form of Islamist theology, a man for whom hatred of Jews was a duty to God, and a man who presented not simply Israel itself, but the Jewish people as a whole throughout history as ‘cursed’ enemies.
Nizar Rayyan is a reminder of exactly what Israel is up against in its fight against Hamas, a group that puts out TV shows aimed at indoctrinating children with ideas of anti-Jewish genocide:
And a group whose ideology promotes a hateful and supremacist version of Islam:
Those who delude themselves that Hamas is simply a ‘resistance movement’ would do well to listen to the words of Nizar Rayyan and to take seriously the real message being promoted by Hamas, a message that presents cease-fires as re-arming periods and which proclaims the long-term existence of Israel to be ‘an impossibility’.
The Philo-Semite Twenty-Five |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, December 22, 2008 |
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I know, I promised fifty, but this is hard. The list might very
well grow to fifty -- keep your suggestions coming -- but for now, here
are twenty-five top philo-Semites. A couple of notes: I did not include
Kabbalah goofballs
such as Madonna, despite demands from numerous
readers. More seriously, I did not include Righteous Gentiles, non-Jews
who saved Jews during the Shoah. That is a special category that
represents something much greater than simple affinity for, and
support of, Jews. Some of you might question the presence of Malcolm
Gladwell on the list; he is there because he is the greatest
philo-Semite I know personally; because he introduced me to my wife,
with whom I have had numerous baby Jews; and because he inspired this list.
To read the full list, click through to Jeff's Atlantic blog.
George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, December 16, 2008 |
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I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him:
And then this:A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."
"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."
Read the rest at The Atlantic.
A Pogrom in Hebron |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, December 9, 2008 |
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A hero of mine is the Ha'aretz reporter Avi Issacharoff, who, with other journalists,
stopped a Jewish pogrom against innocent Palestinians in Hebron. His
harrowing report is here, and Dion Nissenbaum has more detail.
I've written about these Hebron settlers before, and have catalogued
their extremism. But it needs to be said over and over again: They are
a disgrace to Judaism. As the late, great Rabin said of Baruch
Goldstein and his degenerate supporters: "You are an errant weed.
Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of
Jewish law. You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to
Judaism."
The Philo-Semite 50: Cyrus, Maurice Blanchot and Madonna? |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, December 2, 2008 |
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The nominations for the Philo-Semite 50
keep pouring over the transom, and the Sanhedrin is compiling the
list. But I'll post some particularly interesting nominations as they
come in. I suggested last week that readers stop proposing both Jon
Voight and Rashid Khalidi (two great tastes that taste great together)
for admission. I should have included Madonna on that list, though
Goldblog reader Mitch Ginsburg made the case: "I know she's not exactly
the second coming of the Ari, but she's nothing if not devoted to Kabbalah."
Yeah, no.
Monica Osborne, a smarty-pants Jewish-American literature expert
at UCLA wrote in to say, "Well, of course, Maurice Blanchot should be
on this list! (French philosopher, close friend of Jewish-French
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas; Blanchot said that 'Judaism is an
essential modality of all that is human.')" She described him as her
"favorite wanna-be Jew of all time." I'll feed Blanchot's name into the
Philo-Semite UNIVAC as well.
Reader D. Shapiro wrote to say,
"If you're placing Truman that high up, I sure hope you include the
original King Cyrus (who, come to think of it, could teach Ahmadinejad
a thing or two about how to get along with us)." Shapiro also nominates
Denis Leary:
Spare a Thought for Chabad |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, December 1, 2008 |
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I'm not the greatest fan of Chabad in the world, in particular its
Christological, maybe-the-Rebbe's-not-dead streak, and its general
fundamentalist, women-marginalizing outlook, but this is a group that
does, in fact, try to spread a kind of happiness wherever it plants
itself. And it plants itself everywhere. It puts other Jewish
groups to
shame, in fact, by its ebullient outreach. My friend Esther Abramowitz
wrote to note that the "Chabad rabbi and his wife have welcomed and
celebrated with thousands
upon thousands of traveling Israelis with joy and no judgment." That's
the formula, and it's a formula that works.
What happened in Mumbai was a horror. We're now learning that the people in the Chabad house were subjected to special tortures,
but even if they were murdered quickly, they were still murdered, and
they were murdered for the crime of being Jewish. It's astonishing to
think that Pakistani-supported terrorists, obsessed with the alleged
crimes of Hindu India, would go out of their way to murder a group of
people who couldn't find Kashmir on a map. But the Jews are a
cosmological enemy. I think we've learned that by now.
Malcolm Gladwell's Top 50 Philo-Semites |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, November 21, 2008 |
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So, as you have undoubtedly heard, the Forward has chosen me as one of its 50 most influential American Jews. Me, Rahm Emanuel, Sarah Silverman, and Lipa Schmeltzer, among others.
This
honor has changed my life, especially the magnificent gift of 1,000
shares of AIG stock from the finance committee of the Elders of Zion.
It has also caused heartache. Friends are envious, even non-Jewish
friends. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell is very upset. When we were roommates a very long time ago, Malcolm used to listen to the klezmer stylings of Giora Feidman
on his record player. He is, in other words, very Jewy. He is also
deeply wounded. "I am so jealous," he wrote. "Shouldn't there be a
parallel list for wanna-bes?"
Yes,
there should. If the Forward can publish a list of the top 50 Jews,
then Goldblog can publish a list of the top 50 philo-Semites. I don't
have a philosophical problem with this, by the way: I dissent from the
line, first passed on to me by Frank Foer, who, tragically, is not a
top-50 Jew (though his mother is!), that philo-Semites are anti-Semites
who like Jews. So, a list, and one loyal readers can help me assemble.
I already asked Malcolm to provide me names of other philo-Semites, but
he said: "How do I know philo-Semites? I'm such a philo-Semite I only
associate with the real thing."
Here are a few names, just to get us going:
1) George Eliot
2) Barack Obama
3) Harry Truman
4) Emile Zola
5) Malcolm Gladwell
Please send your entries to Goldberg.atlantic@gmail.com, and I'll post them as they come in.
Daniel Levy On Obama, Netanyahu and the Settlements |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, November 18, 2008 |
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"Israel's leaders watched with keen anticipation to see what conclusions the Arab leaders would draw from their military defeat. The conference ended with the adoption of the famous three noes of Khartoum: no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace with Israel. On the face of it these declarations showed no sign of readiness for compromise, and this is how Israel interpreted them. In fact, the conference was a victory for the Arab moderates who argued for trying to obtain the withdrawal of Israeli forces by political rather than military means. Arab spokesmen interpreted the Khartoum declarations to mean no formal peace treaty, but not a rejection of a state of peace; no direct negotiations, but not a refusal to talk through third parties; and no de jure recognition of Israel, but acceptance of its existence as a state. President Nasser and King Hussein set the tone at the summit and made it clear subsequently that they were prepared to go much further than ever before toward a settlement with Israel. At Khartoum, Nasser and Hussein reached a genuine understanding and formed a united front against the hard-liners...The Khartoum summit thus marked a real turning point in Nasser's attitude to Israel. At Khartoum, Nasser advised, and indeed urged, King Hussein to explore the possibility of a peaceful settlement with Israel. This was, of course, not known in Israel at the time. As far as Israel was concerned, the Khartoum declarations closed every door and every window that might lead to a peace settlement. On October 17 the cabinet took a decision that amounted to an official cancellation of the decision of 19 June."The famous three noes are explained as being an opening position and that Jordanian King Hussein actually had something of a mandate from Nasser's Egypt to begin exploratory talks with Israel. We know those took place. We also now know that Egypt itself was putting out peace feelers prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the end, of course, that Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was reached, but only after another needless war--something that might unfortunately be repeated with Syria now.
The Czar Is Dead (Or, Joe Klein Responds) |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, November 4, 2008 |
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Joe Klein, in his response to my earlier post, cedes the point I make about the misuse of the term "anti-Semitism," and I'm grateful for that, and I'm grateful that he's out there selling my book (there's no better way to soften a writer's heart than to praise his books, except maybe handing over cash money). But Joe goes on to say that I'm "truly foolish" for writing the following:
I know that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the Christianity of other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble.
No, Jeff, I don't derive great pleasure from it. I'm pretty anguished about it. As a Jew, I'm embarrassed by these extremists and outraged by their assumption that they represent mainstream Jewish opinion in this country. Furthermore, I don't use the Christianity of Bush et al against them because their Christianity had nothing to do with their support for the war. For people like Doug Feith et al, their Jewish identity--their ethnic nationalism, not the religious part of it--had an awful lot to do with their plumping for war with Iraq and, more recently, Iran. Feith et al advised Binyamin Netanyahu, in a paper called "A Clean Break," to go to war with Iraq when he was Prime Minister in order to protect Israel. I find the conflation, by some Jewish neoconservatives, of Israel's interests and America's--and their truly dangerous misreading of both--to be appalling. But much worse is their rush to pin the tag of anti-Semitism on anyone who disagrees with them, including me.
There is much to unpack here.
First, there is Joes's assertion that Bush's Christianity has "nothing
to do" with his push for war. I think this will surprise a lot of
people, including George W. Bush. Second, I think Joe is
essentializing, to employ an unwieldy term, the Jews who supported the
war. There's no denying - nor should it be denied - that American Jews,
and American Christians as well, worry about Israel's security. (That
Christian bit is important, by the way; I know this drives Mearsheimer and Walt crazy - and I know that Joe is no Mearsheimerite - but polls
show the majority of Americans are sympathetic to Israel, despite the
best efforts of the Mearsheimers and Walts of this country to blame
Israel for America's woes. No Jewish lobby would be powerful enough to
influence American foreign policy if it worked in opposition to the
feelings of a majority of Americans.)
I think Americans, Jews
and non-Jews alike, were worried about Saddam Hussein for many reasons,
including and especially his record of genocide, and I think that many
advocates of the war, myself included, were eager to see Saddam
overthrown because he was a uniquely evil figure on the world stage.
And if the Jewish advocates for the defeat of Saddam argued the way
they did because they were sensitized to the issue of genocide by the
Holocaust, well, so what? In a different context - Darfur, say - they
would be praised for their sensitivity. I would imagine - I certainly
hope - that non-Jews who were mobilized to oppose Saddam were motivated
by his record of genocide as well. But put aside genocide: I tend to
believe, and the record bears this out, that men like Paul Wolfowitz
and Douglas Feith had five or six or seven different motivations in
this war, just as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did, as well.
This
doesn't absolve the Jews in the Bush Administration of incompetence and
negligence, but it doesn't absolve the non-Jews either, especially
because, and I know Joe doesn't want to hear this, the Jews were not
quite the all-powerful figures in the White House and Pentagon that
people imagine them to have been.
But this brings me to a deeper
question: Why is it illegitimate for American Jews to care about
Israel's security and argue for American measures that would strengthen
Israel's security? In a conversation earlier this year, Joe told me the
following: "I just don't want to see policy makers who make decisions
on the basis of whether American policy will benefit Israel or not."
Why
not? American policy makers make decisions that benefit other countries
all the time. American troops are in harm's way in South Korea and
Japan, serving as tripwires against North Korean aggression. American
troops are in Western Europe, in Kosovo, and dozens of other places,
all with the aim of providing security to friends and allies. American
troops died liberating Kuwait and defending Saudi Arabia, and those who
argued for the first Gulf War were seldom accused of putting Kuwait's
interests before America's. So why, exactly, shouldn't American policy
makers consider the security of Israel, an American ally, when they're
making decisions about Middle East policy? Support for Israel is a
question that's worth debating, of course, just as support for Egypt
and Kuwait and South Korea and a dozen other countries around the world
is worth debating. But this country has been committed in a most
bipartisan way to Israel's security for more than sixty years. Now Joe
Klein comes along and suggests that American decisions should be made
without consideration for Israel, and he argues that those who take
Israel's security into account when making decisions - at least those
Jews who do - are somehow disloyal to the United States. (By the way,
just so we're all clear here, I'm not arguing for or against the Iraq
War now; I, for one, believe that the war has set back, among other
things, Israel's security. I'm only talking about the rights of
American Jews to participate in the formulation of American Middle East
policy. Even stupid Jews.)
But let's come to the final issue,
the question of ethnic "embarrassment." I find Joe a little bit
unfathomable on this question, actually. I tend to be unembarrassed by
the actions of other Jews. I don't feel that the idiocy or immorality
of other Jews reflects negatively on me, just as the great achievements
of other Jews don't really redound to my credit. I have a visceral
distaste for cringing (this is the Zionist in me, I guess), because
it's a very unflattering, very ghetto sort of Jewish behavior. It
seems as if people like Joe, whose anger at a handful of Jews for
advocating the Iraq War is so outsized (he seems to spend more energy
attacking neo-conservative Jews than he does the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps) are saying to the rest of the world, "Those Jews over
there, the ones you don't like? Well, I don't like them either! In
fact, I like them less than you like them! So just remember, I'm not them."
But here's the thing: The czar is dead. A little Jewish self-confidence wouldn't be a bad, or inappropriate, thing.
Cross-posted at the Atlantic.
The Anti-Semantic Joe Klein |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, October 31, 2008 |
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Joe Klein is defending Rashid Khalidi from charges of anti-Semitism, and I, for one, am fine with that, as I'll explain in a moment. What I'm not fine with -- what I can't actually believe -- is this line from Joe's blog:
I've never met Rashid Khalidi, but he is (a) Palestinian and therefore (b) a semite, so the charge of anti-semitism is fatuous.
I
want to be absolutely clear that I'm not about to accuse Joe of being
an anti-Semite, but I will note that this the first time I've ever
heard a Jewish person, or a non-anti-Semite, make this sort of
malicious statement, one that perverts the universal meaning of a term
in order to mock the phenomenon of Jew-hatred. "Jew-hatred" is actually
my preferred term, because, as I'm sure Joe knows, "anti-Semitism" was
a term invented by the avant-garde Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr, who was the
founder, in 1879, of the League of Anti-Semites, which argued that
Germans and Jews were locked in a death struggle for racial superiority. And we know where that ended.
Since
Marr's time, of course, the term has evolved from a compliment to an
insult,
but its meaning has held steady all these years. As I said, the only
people who
insult Jews by denying the meaning of the term are, in my experience,
anti-Semitic. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, told me in an
interview once that his organization could not be anti-Semitic, because
Arabs were the true Semites, while Jews were simply European impostors.
This interview occurred at a time when Yassin's suicide bombers were
systematically seeking out large groups of Jews in order to murder them
for the crime of being Jewish. By Joe's dangerous new standard, the
World War II-era Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a
Nazi fellow traveler and a frank advocate of total Jewish
extermination, could not be called an anti-Semite because he was Arab.
So,
really, who's being fatuous?
I know that Joe derives great
pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the
Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while
never seeming to use the Christianity of other supporters of the war,
including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal
figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part
of the rough and tumble. However, emptying the term "anti-Semitism" of
its accepted meaning in order
to score points against John McCain? That's simply too much.
But
about Khalidi -- he's a fierce partisan of the Palestinian cause, of
course, and in my conversations with him, and in his writing, I see
that his sympathies frequently cause him to distort Middle East
history. But an anti-Semite? I don't think so. In fact, Rashid Khalidi
is one of the rare Palestinian advocates who argues, as he has with me,
that Arabs must study Jewish history, including and especially the
history of Jew-hatred, in order to better understand Israel, and to
reach a compromise with it.
By the way, the term Rashid Khalidi uses, in speeches and in his books, to describe Jew-hatred? Anti-Semitism.
Cross-posted from Goldberg's Atlantic blog.
The Jewish Extremists Behind "Obsession" |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, October 28, 2008 |
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Israelis Don't Want To Hear About Arab Democracy |
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| Why U.S. Candidates Should Stop Talking About Israel | |
by Jeffrey Goldberg, October 22, 2008 |
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[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.]
Dear Shmuel,
Happy End-of-the-Holidays. I don't know what I'm looking forward to less -- two more weeks of this campaign, or taking down my sukkah. I have to get a better sukkah next year.
Before I get to McCain, let me acknowledge your perspicacity, as Bill O'Reilly would say: One of the things that's been missing from the debate over which candidate is better for Israel is the question, Which candidate will make America stronger? Because a strong America is a necessity for Israel. I think that the Israeli officials you speak with who suggest that Obama might actually strengthen America's standing in the world are on to something.
Your analysis of McCain's weaknesses, from an Israeli perspective, is spot-on, as well. It's abundantly clear that Israelis of all political denominations become quite frightened when their neo-conservative cousins (not that you have to be Jewish to be a neo-conservative, by the way) talk about exporting democracy to the Muslim world. If you don't mind me quoting myself, I'll repeat a story I told in the Atlantic earlier this year. In December of 2006, Natan Sharansky received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush, and the Israeli embassy held a celebration afterward. As Sharansky extolled the virtues of democracy to the assembled crowd, a senior Israeli security official whispered to me, "What a child." He explained: "It's not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That's what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan." Afterward, I spoke with Sharansky, and in his charmingly self-deprecating way, he told me the following: "After I came back from Washington once," he said, "I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, 'Mazel tov, Natan. You've convinced President Bush of something that doesn't exist.'"
This is a long way of saying that Israelis, in the main, will be relieved when America stops talking about Arab democracy. That said, I don't think John McCain is quite the neoconservative democracy warrior his enemies make him out to be. He is a more practical man, I think, than George W. Bush. But so, for that matter, is Barack Obama. I've looked for signs of incipient Carterism -- defined here as an overarching belief in the power of the talking cure when it comes to evil dictators -- in Obama's actions and statements and so far, I haven't found them. Which is not to say that might not overvalue negotiations when it comes to Iran; we just don't know. I could go on about McCain's views of the Middle East -- where's he strong and where he's not (I do think that, unlike Obama -- thank you, Joe Biden -- America's enemies might not be so eager to test McCain, in part because they might be under the impression that he's crazy) but, today at least, the McCain campaign has a posthumous feel to it, and so I'm thinking more about Obama.
And so, to address your final point: Is it good for Obama to talk about Israel all the time? Yes. I agree with you, but for a slightly different reason. When I interviewed Obama on this subject, he said that one of the jobs of an American president is to hold up a mirror to Israel to show it where it might do better. This was his very polite way of suggesting that he wants to help Israel find a way out of the territories. The key, of course, is for Israelis to feel that a friend is holding up that mirror, not an enemy. Obama is trying very hard to show himself to be that friend.
To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.
RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.
Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.
How Israeli Officials View Obama And McCain |
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| Why U.S. Candidates Should Stop Talking About Israel | |
by Shmuel Rosner, October 21, 2008 |
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[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here.]
Dear Jeffrey,
Since I'm on my way back to the east coast, where I'll spend the next two and a half weeks -- watching election returns somewhere in Ohio or Florida -- I'll soon also have an opportunity to de-sharpen those re-sharpened edges. Or maybe the sharper the better?
I guess our discussion can only move forward if we somewhat abandon our initial topic (why Israel should not be mentioned as mach) and try different angles with which to entertain our Jewcy readers. You asked about Israeli government officials, so I'll start with them, and generally speaking, I think these can be divided into three main groups.
A. Those supporting Obama for a while now. They include Democratic-leaning Israeli officials -- most supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton's and switching to Obama, few supporting Obama from the start. These officials generally believe that a Democrat will make America stronger - hence, will benefit Israel. Some also believe that Obama will get involved in the Israel-Arab peace process and help advance it in ways that Bush could or would not. The more realistic among them think this is mostly true for the Syria-track. There's a fair number of Israelis unhappy with Bush's tendency to oppose -- or not to encourage -- an Israeli Syrian dialogue. Anyway - these pro-Obama supporters consist the smallest of the three groups I was mentioning.
B. The second group will be the one of late-comers to the Obama cause. These people, I suspect, will grow in number as long as the polls show an apparent Obama victory (if they do). It is the international manifestation of the band-wagon effect: essentially, Israelis understand that Obama is going to win, so they might as well try to see the benefits and advantages of such candidate. Talking to the members of this group is pretty funny because one can easily detect the ways with which they try to rationalize an argument they aren't comfortable with. If polls, or atmosphere somehow changes -- these people will rush back to the group where they originally belong: McCain supporters.
C. This is basically the B group without the pretense, and its rapidly shrinking (Israelis, to they credit, were always very practical in nature). It consists of people who rather have McCain as the American president and are still willing to say it.
Their arguments -- and the argument of most knowledgeable Israelis supporting the experienced battle-tested McCain over Obama -- are quite clear: they want a president who understands the need to use power, and does not entertain the illusion that with charismatic personality one can change the Middle East (related to this topic, I really recommend that people will read your Atlantic piece on McCain and the use of power). In some ways, what they fear in Obama is the repetition of Bush the democracy-promoter. It's true that most Israelis think Bush was a friendly president, but readers should realise that very few of them really bought into the lets-democratize-the-region notion. Too realistic to believe, or too racist (Ariel Sharon famously said "after all, it is Arabs we are talking about here"), or too experienced -- Israelis liked the part of Bush that was supportive of security concerns, and vehement in fighting terror, but didn't as much appreciate his desire to transform the Mideast. Not that they don't want it -- they just don't think it's possible. Not now, not this way.
Surprisingly, what some of them see in Obama is a different kind of the same naivete. How's that for a surprisingly refreshing point of view?
Now back to the original topic of this exchange: does mentioning Israel helps Obama with Israelis? it really does. If one tries to find the positive aspects to this constant attention the country is getting, it is the fact that Israelis do feel now much more comfortable with Obama than they did a year or half a year ago.
I'll leave you the benefit of starting the discussion of McCain and Israel.
Best,
Rosner
To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here.
RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.
Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.
Racism Is The Root Of Anti-Obama Paranoia Among Jews |
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| Why U.S. Candidates Should Stop Talking About Israel | |
by Jeffrey Goldberg, October 20, 2008 |
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[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter, to which the following is a reply, can be read here.]
Dear Shmuel,
Happy New Year, first of all. It's nice to read you again; the Ha'aretz site is a barren place without you. And you seem even more blunt than usual; I suppose this has to do with your return to Israel. Your re-aliyah will inevitably re-sharpen your edges.
I'm of two minds about even having this dialogue, because I do tend to think, as you do, that Israel is mentioned far too often in presidential debates. On the other hand, who doesn't like to be the center of attention? We Jews have gotten used to this over the past 3,000 years or so.
Let me wrestle with two of your points. You write of Israelis, "The constant need for the husband to say how much he loves the bride does not mean the bride is lovable but rather that she lacks self-confidence." I think you're a bit too harsh on your countrymen. It's natural, and inevitable, that Israelis would worry about the possibly-shifting feelings of their great benefactor. Jewish history, if nothing else, makes this natural, though I don't think this behavior is unusual at all for any country that is essentially a client state. This insecurity does have unpleasant manifestations, of course – loyalty tests, for one thing, and a weakness for victimology.
The Yad Vashem-to-Sderot Express, which all foreign dignitaries are forced to ride upon their arrival in Israel – "Look what they did to us!" meets "Look what they're doing to us!" – is a particularly unpleasant manifestation of this. Just ask Barack Obama, who would have probably enjoyed a visit to brash, positive modern Israel.
But to your main question: I think that most Jews who oppose the rise of Obama are opposing him for reasons other than Israel.
Yes, there are actual, ideologically-Republican Jews out there; and yes, I suppose there are Jews, primarily in Flatbush, who believe that John McCain will defend the Jewish claim to Greater Jerusalem (which is a terribly important cause when you live in Brooklyn, apparently) with greater fervor than would Barack Obama. But in my own experience, I would have to say that simple racism motivates much of the anti-Obama anxiety in corners of the Jewish community. I don't know what else explains it.
His positions on most matters related to Israel are indistinguishable from those of AIPAC. This anti-Obama feeling is, of course, disappointing, but not altogether astonishing. A black president with a strange name elicits the same fears among Jews in New York and Florida that it does among Protestants in West Virginia. That said, I assume there are fence-sitters out there who are comforted to learn that Obama doesn't actually hate Jews (and is, in fact, very nearly surrounded by Jews) so it does seem useful for Obama, and his surrogates, to remind Jews that he is a something of a Zionist fellow-traveler. In fact, this latest Jesse Jackson episode provides a good opening for the delivery of just such a message.
We'll get to McCain later, I hope. For now, I'm curious to hear you on what Israeli government officials actually think of Obama. Do they really believe that he is in some way hostile to their interests?
Best,
Jeff
To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here.
RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.
Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.
Rosner's response to this letter will follow shortly.
Why U.S. Candidates Should Stop Talking About Israel |
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| Hint: It's Bad for the Jews | |
by Shmuel Rosner, October 20, 2008 |
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Both Shmuel Rosner and Jeffrey Goldberg have written recently of the need for American national candidates to stop gibbering on about Israel. "The goal of Zionism is normalcy, Jewish normalcy," Goldberg noted last week on his Atlantic blog. "This, of course, is an oxymoron, but we can still hope. The cause is not helped when presidential candidates, well-meaning though they might be, constantly invoke the existential dangers to Israel when arguing for a) getting out of Iraq; b) staying in Iraq; c) talking to Iran; or d) bombing Iran." For his part, Rosner pointed out in a long-form essay for Slate that in the Palin-Biden debate, Israel was mentioned a total of 17 times, outstripping by far references to more pressing foreign policy concerns for the U.S. (China, Russia, Europe). It's not in either country's interest to overemphasize a relationship that, however "sacrosanct" (to borrow Barack Obama's word for it), is by no means exclusive.
Jewcy invited Goldberg and Rosner to discuss their mutual fantasy of minimal Israel chatter in an ongoing email dialogue. Below is Rosner's opening salvo; Goldberg's reply will be posted later today.
Dear Jeffrey,
I'll start by repeating the core argument I was making in Slate. It was not about the importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance, or the reasons such alliance is desirable (for both countries). My complaint was about the frequency with which presidential candidates mention Israel. I think this hurts Israel because it presents is as a country that is more trouble than an asset to America. I also think that it distorts the voters' perception of American foreign policy. Israel is important, and is located in an important region. But mentioning Israel more than Chine, Russia, the European Union and its leaders (Germany, France, Britain) gives the wrong impression about the real interests and the real motives for numerous US policy decisions.
The question for this email exchange, though, is how do we make it interesting for readers. If we both agree that Israel's name should come up in the election with less frequency, the only way for us to have a debate is if we have some disagreements regarding the reasons for which we want it off the radar screen. My argument is fairly straight forward: it hurts Israel. It's not about "normalcy" (as you briefly argue in the blog item you wrote about this topic) -- it's about interests. I don't think the candidates really serve Israel's interest when they talk about it. And since both of they claim -- and I believe it to be right -- to be staunch supporters of Israel, their actions contradict their intentions. As we both know, this is probably happening mainly because of politics. The candidates think that they need to keep saying how much they love Israel in order for people --mostly Jewish -- to feel comfortable with them and to support them.
I find it to be both ignorant and insulting: most American Jews care for Israel but are not one-issue voters. They might not vote for a candidate that is openly hostile to Israel, but will hardly make the nuances of Israel-related policies the definite reason for which to vote or not vote for specific candidates. If there's a litmus test, both McCain and Obama have passed it a very long time ago. This does not mean that their different approaches to Middle East policies have no significance as far as Israel is concerned. It does mean that they can stop using Israel by way of explaining why staying/leaving Iraq is the right way to go, or why talking/bombing Iran will be the appropriate policy for the U.S. to pursue.
As I wrote in my Slate piece, I think Israelis should also grow up and stop drooling whenever a debate is moving in Israel's direction. The constant need for the husband to say how much he loves the bride does not mean the bride is lovable but rather that she lacks self-confidence. In the case of Israel, self-confidence in not just a quality that's more appealing, it is also a matter of national security. If Israelis need this constant approval, it means that they aren't sure about the US' support. If they aren't sure, their enemies might be convinced that it's really something they can further erode by pursuing more aggressive policies.
But let me ask you this Jeffrey: Is it Israel that makes Jewish voters uncomfortable about Barack Obama? you've written a lot about Obama and the Jews (as I did too), and you seem to think that something else is at play here - dare we say racism? and if that's the case, can Obama overcome such weariness by talking more about Israel? And what about McCain: can he really convince Jewish voters to vote for him by convincing them that Obama's policies will endanger Israel - or is he really going to scare Americans voters who might think that he is going to war with Iran because of Israel?
A lot to talk about, and so little time.
Best,
Shmuel
Jeffrey Goldberg's reply can be read here.
Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.
RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.
Dexter Filkins: The Progress in Iraq is Remarkable |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, September 16, 2008 |
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Dexter Filkins is the greatest war correspondent of my generation, and
I would say this even if we weren't friends. We've reported together on
occasion; Dexter knows better than anyone how to work your way into bad
places, and work your way out again. He's also the author of a great
new book, coming out imminently from Knopf, called "The Forever War." I e-mailed him some questions about his Times story today, and here are his answers:
Jeffrey Goldberg: In a review in the Times today, Michiko Kakutani quotes Farnaz Fassihi writing
in 2004: "The genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleashed onto this
country as a result of American mistakes, and it can't be put back into a
bottle." The question is, is the genie back in the bottle?
Dexter Filkins: Yes, it is, for now. The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after
being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me
to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live--on the Tigris
River--was a dead, dying, spooky place. It's now filled with people--families
with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in
2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own
judgments that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They're voting
with their feet. It's a wonderful thing to see.
Having said that, it's
pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of
arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni
Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the
bottle, but I'm not sure for how long.
JG: The most
astonishing detail in your article today is your description of a parade through
Ramadi, which included "American marines and soldiers wearing neither helmets
nor body armor, nor carrying guns." You wrote, "The festive scene became an
occasion for celebration by Iraqis and Americans, who at several moments
wondered aloud in the sweltering heat how things had gone from so grim to so
much better, so fast." How much of this can be credited to the surge in troops
and the shift in tactics last year, and how much to the notion that Iraqis
simply got tired of the killing?
DF: Astonishing indeed. I haven't seen Americans soldiers walking around Iraq
without helmets since the summer of 2003, when the Americans, who were popular
in southern Iraq for having taken down Saddam, used to do that.
What's happened in Anbar really doesn't have anything to do with the surge and, in fact, it is one of the main reasons why the surge has worked.
In Anbar, two things happened: Al Qaeda overreached and the Americans wised up. If you will recall, the Americans came into Iraq in 2003 in a very heavy-handed way, often sweeping up large groups of young males who had nothing to do with the insurgency. In a tribal society, where everyone is related to everyone else, the Americans dug themselves a very large hole.
Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, through sheer ruthlessness, became the dominant player in the insurgency. And while the guys from Al Qaeda were very good at killing Americans, a goal with which many Sunnis sympathized, they also wanted to kill Iraqi Shiites, who they consider apostates, and anyone associated with the Iraqi government. Ordinary Iraqis, it's now clear, didn't want to go along.
Sheikhing up Al QaedaAnd the sheikhs in Anbar
didn't go along. So when Al Qaeda started murdering the sheikhs, the sheikhs
went to the Americans. The Americans, chastened by their earlier mistakes,
grabbed the opportunity. They made a deal. They crushed Al Qaeda in Anbar. The
result is the calm you see today.
The Sunni Awakening, which began in
Anbar, spread rapidly to other Sunni areas of Iraq, and that took enormous
pressure off the Americans and the Iraqi government as the surge kicked
in.
JG: One tribal leader you quote, Hamid
al-Hais, puts most of the blame for the chaos of the previous years on Paul
Bremer's decision to disband the army. Do you agree?
DF: I don't know. I don't think there are any one-line explanations for any of this.
But it's pretty clear that decision had a lot of bad consequences.
JG: Is the average
Iraqi better off today than he was under Saddam? Or, put another way, is the
average Iraqi who was not directly tied to the regime better off today than he
was six years ago?
DF: Today is a moment in time. The calm is just a few months old. The Iraqis have
been through an extraordinarily violent and traumatic five years. Many, many
people suffered horrendously under Saddam. Ask me the question again in five
years.
JG: Is Iraq a democracy?
DF: I don't think so. A democracy has many things: elections, compromise between
groups, an atmosphere safe enough to discuss the issues of the day, and
institutions that exist outside of government that are strong enough to allow
all of the above to flourish--newspapers, political groups and the like. In Iraq,
most of those things are in their infancy.
JG: How do you, as an
American, feel walking through Baghdad today vs. two years ago?
DF: I'll answer with two snapshots from dusk. I went running in the park in front of
the New York Times house the other day as the sun was going down and I felt no
threat at all. People waved, people smiled. It felt very normal.
A couple of days later I went to Sadr City, also at dusk. Sadr City is a vast slum that takes in about three million people. It's the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia, and it's been the scene of heavy fighting, as recently as a few months ago. I was with some Iraqi friends. It felt perfectly normal. Then one of my Iraqi friends said to me, "What do you think would happen if you were alone?" And I said, "What?" And he and the other Iraqis laughed and said: "You'd be dead in ten seconds."
Let me just say: I left.
[Cross-posted from The Atlantic]
Why McCain's Campaign Peddles Nonsense |
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by Jeffrey Goldberg, September 12, 2008 |
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Like many people who have covered John McCain, I think of him as a deeply serious man, preoccupied with America's defense and its position in the world. So I've been confused for the past few days, trying to figure out why he's allowing his campaign to make a circus of this election, leveling unserious and dishonest accusations about Barack Obama's positions on sex education and Sarah Palin.
Then it came to me: The answer can be found in my new Atlantic cover story! (How's that for Washington-based solipsism?) The story grapples with John McCain's philosophy of war, and in particular with the doctrine of preemption, which McCain still endorses. So do I, in certain cases, but that's not the point. The point is that McCain knows that preemption isn't the easiest sell these days: "It's very hard to run for president on this idea right now," he told me.
So, what do you do when one of your core ideas is out of sync with the predispositions of the American public? You spend your days talking about lipstick on pigs. This might win him the election, but I'd rather see him debate preemption.
The Michael Chabon Interview |
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| Jeffrey Goldberg talks to the Pulitzer-winning author about Sarah Palin, Reindeer sausage, and lingonberries. | |
by Jeffrey Goldberg, September 9, 2008 |
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Michael Chabon: contemplates sarah palinMichael Chabon is an expert on a great many things, especially hummus and Alaska. He seemed like the perfect person to turn to for a conversation about Sarah Palin:
Jeffrey Goldberg: Isn't it great that Michael Palin's sister is running for vice president?
Michael Chabon: Jeffrey, I fear it might actually be kind of sad that I had exactly the same thought when I first heard her name. At least we can safely assume, at this point, that Governor Palin fully appreciates the deep wisdom contained in that old axiom: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
JG: Is Sarah Palin Jewish? Her husband was in the Yiddish Policemen's Union. Or maybe the Steelworkers, I forget.
MC: It's unlikely and, I feel, sort of weird the way this Alaskan lady's fortunes have become caught up, and so quickly, with those of the Jews. An exhaustive search of press mentions on Lexis-Nexis reveals that, until very recently, "Alaska" and "Jews" had been included in the same sentence only 18 times, ever. I know I probably deserve some of the credit for this uptick, but I decline to accept it.
JG: What's your favorite Alaskan food?
MC: I know you want me to say moose. You probably also want me to point out that moose (properly slaughtered of course) is kosher. Same goes for reindeer. I have eaten both, in Juneau, Sitka and Wrangell. Reindeer sausage. Mooseburger. Also fiddlehead ferns and lingonberries. But I'm going to have to go with lox.
JG: Alaska. Crazy place, or what?
MC: It's crazy beautiful, that's for sure. I found it a dark place, and not just because it was literally dark much of time, during my second visit, in late winter. Also, I found it (the place, not the people) hostile, and not just in the sense that wilderness is generally said to be hostile. I kept thinking of that bit from Twin Peaks, where the sheriff says, "There is something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want, a darkness, a presence." Almost everything humans have built there is unbelievably ugly. That might have something to do with the air of resentment given off by the underlying terrain.
JG: Do you think Barack Obama has placated whatever fears elderly Jews have of him?
MC: Huh, I don't know, can elderly Jews actually be placated? The Israeli government, as you know, has squandered billions of shekels to date on one ill-starred placation program after another, with results that have been uniformly disappointing, leading it to issue the famous finding: You just can't alter a kocker.
But if anyone can do it, Obama can.
JG: Do you think McCain was a) smart, or b) stupid, to pick Palin as his running mate?
MC: I think the answer is probably both more pathetic and more chutzpadich than either a) or b) would imply.
JG: Are any of your children named Bristol, Willow or Track?
MC: I was kind of excited when I thought Willow was a Buffy shout-out. Like, how cool, she named her kid after a Jewish lesbian witch! It was part of this weird, innocent spasm of credit-extending that I experienced on first seeing the Governor in action last Friday. But the moment was very short-lived, alas. I bet she doesn't even watch Buffy. The names are kind of awesome, in my opinion. But then I have a son named Ezekiel Napoleon Waldman Chabon.
[This is cross-posted from Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic blog, which we think is great, and you should visit often]
Norman Finkelstein Accuses Jeffrey Goldberg Of Torturing Palestinians |
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by Daniel Koffler, May 28, 2008 |
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Crazy Man Behind A Microphone: Norman Finkelstein says the darndest things
Sometimes a guy just can't win. Last week, we noted that a deranged person with a blog for deranged people accused Jeffrey Goldberg of being a "jihadist" agitating for "Jewicide" because his position on West Bank settlements is the same as the position of the Israeli government. Moreover, our two-bit character assassin couldn't look past the idea of minimal dissent from her self-destructive militarism, to notice that Goldberg had made greater sacrifices for Israel than she ever could --- specifically by volunteering for the IDF --- and so might just be arguing on the level, rather than from ulterior, Jewicidal motives.
Well, it looks like serving with the IDF doesn't buy Goldberg any credit with the extreme paranoid left, either. Specifically, Norman Finkelstein accuses Goldberg of having tortured Palestinians while serving as a prison guard. What's Finkelstein's evidence? Well, he doesn't have evidence, but he has the next best thing, assumptions, and he has them in abundance. Perhaps it's giving away too much to Finkelstein to observe that he can't be bothered to decide whether he's accusing Goldberg of being an active party to torture, or an accessory to torture, or merely insensitive to Palestinian suffering.
Jewcy has covered Professor Finkelstein's strange case at some length. Whatever the substantive merits of his tenure denial --- on which his extracurricular endeavors should have had no bearing provided his scholarship was up to scratch --- and whatever the credibility of some of his antagonists, Finkelstein has a pretty well-established history of propagating outrageous, paranoid nonsense. Pathological people can't help themselves, so perhaps Goldberg shouldn't take things personally. In any case, Goldberg did respond to Brad A. Greenberg that "[The accusation] is just ridiculous. I never laid a hand on anybody...One of my principle roles there was making sure the prisoners had fresh fruit...Norman Finkelstein is a ridiculous figure and he is lying and purposely misreading my book." So it would seem.
Atlas Shrugs Blog: Where Sociopathy Gets Confused With Zionism |
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by Daniel Koffler, May 20, 2008 |
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When Jeffrey Goldberg, an American Jewish Zionist, reached his twenties, he decided he couldn't justify calling himself a Zionist unless he shared in the struggles of Israelis. Thus, making a move virtually unheard of among American Jews, he took Israeli citizenship to join the IDF during the first Intifada, and gave several of the most productive years of his life in service to the Jewish state. (He even wrote a book about it.)
So when he writes an op-ed for the Times arguing that Israeli settlements weaken Israeli security, and hence the organized fronts of American Zionism pushing the Israeli government to coddle the settler movement are hurting Israel and need to rethink what they're doing, it's a fair bet that he's sounding an alarm because of his love for the country, and giving warning true friends of Israel will heed.
"Atlas": Jewess fights crime, antisemitism, own sanity
False friends of Israel, on the other hand, go into a petit mal seizure at the slightest hint of deviation from a platform of dispatching all the Palestinians with extreme prejudice, and grand mal when that deviationism comes from a fellow Jew. So it only stands to reason that this crazy, inexplicably popular blogger would try to fulfill her service to Israel by smearing a better and truer Zionist than she could ever be, exclaiming: "JEWICIDAL JIHADI BENDS OVER, SUBMITS DEMANDS [sic] ISRAEL." And there's more! "Atlas" --- as she preposterously calls herself out of some deeply confused homage to a failed novelist-cum-failed philosopher who actually was a Jew who loathed Judaism --- wants to let us know that in addition to all his jihadi faggotry, Goldberg is also a "self-loathing" "jihadi" (she has six separate variations on "Jihad Jeffro," "Jihad Jeff," etc.) complicit in "jewicide," which is later helpfully defined as "dismantling of settlements" in English, and "annihilat[ion of] the Jews" in hyperthyroidic-Kach-speak. Worse still, she notes, Golberg dared to use the name "Jerusalem," which again, in glandularly-disordered-Kachist is "And the use of the word sanctity.Jerusalem is sacred, you asshat." (It's really a different grammar entirely.)
But Goldberg's deepest betrayal of his people, for which "Atlas" would call him a Kapo if she actually knew anything about Jewish history, is --- you guessed it --- explaining to the goyim that "Mr. Obama is actually more pro-Israel than either Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak...[t]o say nothing of John McCain and President George W. Bush...." To which "Atlas" responds, staying classy, "Obama is more pro-Israel than Hitler maybe...."
Indeed, it was Goldberg's recent interview with Obama that first tipped "Atlas" off to the fact that Goldberg might in fact be a jihadi faggot, or as her slightly more house-trained pal Caroline Glick puts it, "a disillusioned Zionist who abandoned Israel and moved back to America." Because what better description could there be of one of the most authentically and unequivocally Zionist voices --- with all the baggage that entails --- in American journalism?
Here's the thing though. People like "Atlas" and Glick have no standing to pronounce on anybody else's Zionist credentials, because they don't have the slightest clue what the concept of Zionism is in the first place. Hence any sentence coming out of their mouths with the word "Zionism" or "Zionist" in it may sound like articulate speech, but is in fact strictly and literally meaningless. The difference between "Atlas," Glick, and the other Daddy's-Amex-fascisti on the one hand, and sociopaths like Apollo Braun on the other, is that he at least makes 250 bucks a sweatshirt. In any case, people with no moral sense can't be morally persuaded, but they can be effectively shunned.
Jeff Goldberg on "The Israel Lobby" |
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by Michael Weiss, October 1, 2007 |
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His review in TNR will no doubt get a lot of attention (Matt Yglesias, one of Mearsheimer and Walt's defenders, is already mentioning his own Jewish grandparents -- never a good early sign in intellectual combat).
Going on some of the quotes Jeff pulls, I have to say, his critique seems devastating:
They do not deny, though, that "there is anti-Semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist." This is a bizarre and foul passage, its foulness easily clarified by a simple act of substitution. Imagine Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing the following sentence: "We would not deny that there is some racial prejudice among whites, some of it provoked by the misbehavior of African- Americans, and some of it straightforwardly racist."
Or, to go for the more obvious example: "We would not deny that there is some racial prejudice among Israelis, some of it provoked by Palestinian behavior, and some of it straightforwardly racist." A sentence like that would be a scandal in all the usual places, wouldn't it?
M/W's blunder here comes at the expense of a topic they're most tetchy about: the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The above rationale for why anti-Semitism is on the rise again suggests that the two phenomena are inextricably linked. Yet M/W elsewhere swoop down like diver pigeons the minute anyone suggests that a condemnation of Israel necessarily has anything to do with condemnation of Jews as an ethnic group.
Whistling through contradictions of analysis and having it both ways depending on which way suits you better-- such are the hallmarks of the "realist" school of foreign policy. Perhaps the greatest irony of the whole sorry debate is how effusively The Israel Lobby has been taken up in Arab media, despite its open dedication to Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations. It's as if Henry Ford were handing out copies of Das Kapital in Detroit.
Here's Jeff again:
In their discussion of these matters, Mearsheimer and Walt seem not just mendacious but also shallow. They are dilettantes in the subject, tourists in the conflict. Consider an example. After cherry-picking quotations from jihadists to support the view that America's ties to Israel brought us the attacks of September 11, they raise the subject of Sayyid Qutb's anti-Americanism. Qutb was a terribly important Egyptian Islamist, and Al Qaeda's main intellectual inspiration. Mearsheimer and Walt instruct that "Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian dissident whose writings have been an important inspiration for contemporary Islamic fundamentalists, was hostile to the United States both because he saw it as a corrupt and licentious society and also because of U.S. support for Israel." But wait. Qutb was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966, almost a year before the Six Day War. It was not until after that war that America replaced France as Israel's chief protector and arms- supplier. In fact, throughout the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration was often quite hostile to Israel. So Qutb's objection, then, was not to American support for Israel, but to American recognition of Israel. If this is the case, then Islamist anger at America predates our support for the usurping Zionists. And if this is so, then Al Qaeda would have attacked the United States whether or not America was Israel's patron, and whether or not the pro-Israel lobby existed. Therefore, as far-fetched as this may seem, the Jews should not be blamed for the attack on the World Trade Center.
In all fairness, Jeff's review is not without a contradiction of its own, namely its treatment of M/W's blame-Israel-first disposition on Al Qaeda and 9/11. Early on he writes:
It is rather uncontroversial to call Osama bin Laden an anti-Semite. He is the easy case. But since many people in the West are queasy about attaching the label of anti-Semitism to almost anybody, regarding the charge of anti-Semitism as itself proof of prejudice, let me begin by describing bin Laden's view of history less inflammatorily--not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric. He believes that Jews exercise disproportionate control over world affairs, and that world affairs may therefore be explained by reference to the Jews. A Judeocentric view of history is one that regards the Jews as the center of the story, and therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is a single- cause theory of history, and as such it is, almost by definition, a conspiracy theory.
But then he claims: "Never mind that Mearsheimer and Walt exaggerate the centrality of the Jews in bin Laden's worldview."
Judeocentrism, by definition, plants the Jews at the center of one's historical outlook. So either Bin Laden suffers from the pathology or he does not. The failure here may be only linguistic rather than logical, but one simply cannot exaggerate the centrality of the Jews in a Judeocentrist worldview.
Thus Spake the Chief Spook |
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by Michael Weiss, May 14, 2007 |
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Even before 9/11, I didn't much like the CIA (I've always been more of a MI6 man myself, and as for as cold, brutal efficiency in international spycraft, I'm sorry, but the Russians simply did it better). But listening to Jeffrey Goldberg's interview the the universally execrated George Tenet has left me in no state of confusion as to how Al Qaeda managed to invade the United States: We had Woody Allen as our last line of defense.
“Well, the only thing I can say—I mean, well, I think people may believe that we knew all the answers to these questions,” he said. “And then there’s the whole ‘Well, why didn’t you resign?’ But wait a minute. I had, you know—anybody has misgivings about going to war. And I thought about this. In my view, there’s a little bit of misunderstanding about the job of director. I mean, you know, you don’t cross that policy line. You’re supposed to provide objective assessments and analysis. They”—policymakers—“make decisions on the policies they’re going to make. Obviously, you know, we said what we said about W.M.D. They do the cost-benefit, risk calculation about what they think that means. We don’t. They do.”
Silencing Rabbi Michael Lerner |
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by Tahl Raz, March 2, 2007 |
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